Litecoin Continues To Gain Momentum

Litecoin, the newest cryptocurrency hitting the market, is already making waves. Litecoin acts as an alternative to Bitcoin and has been under the radar for years. However, the future of Litecoin has been established thanks to the Litecoin Foundation and Litecoin Core released a new “litecoin roadmap”. This plan has caused some mainstream blockchain transactions networks to pivot their focus towards Litecoin over Bitcoin.

The cryptocurrency has been gaining a lot of momentum recently with a major code upgrade known as Segregated Witness, or SegWit. SegWit was proposed back in 2015 by Bitcoin but hasn’t been formally embraced until now. One of the upgrade’s main functions is to address transaction malleability, where transaction data can be manipulated to invalidated future transactions. However, SegWit has developed since its original inception and has expanded to remedy to one of the biggest problems facing cryptocurrencies—scaling. Cryptocurrency transactions are logged through the Blockchain, which is essentially a ledger that tracks all transactions that have taken place. As with all digital aspects, storage and file size is a major factor. Transaction blocks are currently maxed at one megabyte, which simply isn’t enough to monitor all of the transactions taking place each minute. This inability to keep up with transactions has led to delayed processing times, sometimes even taking days at a time. With the whole idea of online currency transactions being instantaneous, this is obviously an issue.

SegWit increases block size limits to four megabytes. SegWit also achieves its initial goal of stopping transaction malleability, but these developments have made it hard for secondary solutions like the Lightning Network to be fully implemented. The Lightning Network is an alternative to Blockchain with the intention of lightening the processing load of the latter network. If transactions can be processed via both networks, in addition to the larger block size limits, then processing times will be much faster.

Bitcoin users and miners haven’t been able to reach a consensus regarding SegWit, and consensus is required since all cryptocurrencies run on a peer-regulated network. Litecoin has decided to embrace SegWit, and it has paid off already with the price of Litecoins going up.

Another bonus for Litecoin comes with Coinbase supporting the cryptocurrency. Coinbase is a service that allows users to buy Bitcoins, but now the company is moving to embrace all digital currency forms in hopes of becoming a digital currency vendor. The reason for Coinbase supporting Litecoin can be traced to their implementation of SegWit.

The digital currency community decided to let Litecoin be the testing ground for SegWit and now it seems the cryptocurrency form is on an upward trajectory towards mainstream applicability. Litecoin’s further development plans include making transactions easier, more secure and with faster processing times. If SegWit continues to work like it has been and Lightening Network can be fully implemented successfully, then Litecoin may very well be on its way to becoming one of the major players in the digital currency community. If that happens, we should see more online gambling sites accept Litecoin in the near future.